Does JD.com Have All It Needs to Take Alibaba Head On?

With Alibaba, evolving as a global leading player in eCommerce, JD.com is gearing up its arsenal to take Jack Ma’s Company Head On. The company which claims to be the largest direct sales company of China in 2013, owning about 46.5% market share, is really taking its competition very seriously across different front. In a recent post, Reuters encompassed how JD.com Inc founder Richard Liu is ready to compete with Alibaba, this article has taken facts and quotes from the same.

What makes JD.com an exciting competition to Alibaba and Amazon?

Like Amazon Model

JD.com, follows Amazon like fulfilment centric model, unlike Alibaba. On Chinese turf, where 80% e-commerce is accounted by places where Alibaba reaches using unreliable postal service of China, JD.com is building its own capability, with delivery staff larger then Alibaba and same day delivery to over 40 cities.

Led by a Great Leader – Richard Liu

Richard Liu has emerged as a great leader, for following simple reasons

Lead by Example

Every year, around the June 18 anniversary of his first company’s establishment, Liu dons a red JD.com delivery uniform and personally delivers products to unsuspecting customers.

On Monday, Liu took to the streets of northern Beijing, near the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium, at the handlebars of one of JD’s 3-wheel delivery scooters. At first berated by a guard for parking at the wrong entrance of the former Olympic village, Liu finally delivered an order of dog food to a bemused office worker on the third storey of an apartment block.

This clearly highlights strong customer focus of Liu.

Admired Controller of his Stuff

Liu controls about 85% of voting rights in JD.com, and his investors, experts have admired his control provisions. Even while delivering an order Liu ensures he does not miss any important decision and continues to earn investors trust for seeing him as the caption of the ship. He has the complete and unilateral control of the board, which interns control the company.

A Dark Horse

“When I first met Richard it was eight years ago,” said Xu, Liu’s first major investor. “We met at 10 p.m. and talked until 2 a.m. I felt like this was a dark horse,” she said, anticipating a strong future for the then unannounced entrepreneur.

Liu claims to have a simple personal life, limited friends and no social, media or entertainment circles.

Describing himself as single minded, focused and dedicated worker, Liu intends to stay focused on core business of JD.com, eCommerce. Which is unlike Alibaba, that has diverse investment in other no core businesses.

A Strong Ally

March 2014, Tenacent – acclaimed arch rival of Alibaba – took 15% stake in JD.com make the duo alliance a much stronger proposition to stand up against their competition.

The strongest joint proposition of Tenacent and JD.com is WeChat, an ubiquitous app on chinese smartphones. With this alliance, WeChat has evolved into a excellent mobile commerce platform, making JD.com aspire for leading position in Chinese mobile commerce market. Intrestingly the whole world is shifting to mobile commerce, hence it todays leader on mobile is tomorrow’s ecommerce leader.

Exciting and Large Chinese market

JD.com with great leadership of Liu, strong believing investors, mobile leadership with WeChat and its continued delivery promise better then Alibaba, can be a deadly mix in the same exciting land of ecommerce opportunities that houses Tmall, Taobao, Amazon.cn, etc.

And it is needless to say that customer satisfaction is key driver for eCommerce loyalty. Hence if JD.com can deliver better customer experience via its focus on fulfillment and mobile, we might see a quick shift in customers to JD.com